


Capital H Human

by Sita_Z



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Can be read as Spock/McCoy but doesn't have to, Character Study, Child Abuse, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Racism, Vulcan Culture, Vulcans, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2017-03-18
Packaged: 2018-10-07 06:44:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10354446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sita_Z/pseuds/Sita_Z
Summary: Spock doesn’t take bigotry from the Vulcan High Ministers, but allows himself to be called ‘hobgoblin’ by Leonard McCoy.This is why.A story from McCoy’s perspective.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This story deals with discussions of racism and internalized xenophobia, so please be aware of that. There's also an incident of non-graphic violence and sexual abuse, although none of the main characters are involved. Please take the warnings seriously; this is not a very happy story.

Everyone has their secrets, I guess. Their skeletons in the closet, to use a very human turn of phrase. And why not? That’s what I am, me, Leonard McCoy – as human as they come.  


That’s not exactly a secret, now. What I don’t tell people is that I used to believe I was Human. That’s how we spelled it in our blogs and brochures. Like in those old-timey texts where they spell god with a capital G. We were Humans. Not vulcans, andorians, tellarites. Capital-H Humans.  


Might have been a good name for us, come to think of it, but of course it wasn’t dramatic enough. Today, they call themselves ‘Earth First’, but back then we were the Human Society. We thought that was clever: humans – no, Humans, I should say – had been reduced to an endangered species by all those high-and-mighty alien races, and like the Humane Society of old times, we were going to save the endangered race. The Human race. Yeah, those capital letters mattered to us, they did.  


My introduction to that fine gentlemen’s club (of course we had female members, but our chairmen were just that, men, and we liked it that way) happened very innocuously, the old ‘a friend of a friend told me about it’. There was no secret handshake and no cloak-and-dagger meeting in some old warehouse kind of shit. No, we met at George Carmichael’s house, sat on the porch sipping iced tea and talked. Said out loud all the things everyone thought (every Human, anyway) and no one could say because they weren’t politically correct: How the vulcans had held us back for centuries, kept technology from us that could’ve saved Human lives. How the andorians milked Earth for what it was worth in our interplanetary trade agreements, and cited Protection Laws whenever we tried to back out of that shitty deal. How aliens set up shop in our cities and got jobs that were meant for Humans. How companies would rather hire a vulcan because they got the same work done in half the time, and how that left Humans standing in the rain, trying and failing to support their Human families.  


That kind of thing. You’ve heard it before, I’m sure, or read it on the FedWeb. I won’t lie to you, now – sometimes it wasn’t just politics we talked. Sometimes we waxed philosophical: There was a good reason why every alien species had evolved in and adapted to a very specific environment, and no good could come out of removing a race from their home turf. Didn’t andorians have to wear ThermoGarb wherever they went, because the Terran sun was far too strong for them? And the vulcans – making sure their embassy buildings were hermetically sealed (for tens of thousands of credits, no less), just to keep their precious logical selves from freezing? Was any of that right or natural? Didn’t Nature herself slap us in the face with the message ‘stay where you came from’?  


We cited Darwin and Kant during those discussions, and some of us cited the Bible or the Qur’an (that always led to awkward pauses, because there were things we knew we couldn’t agree on, and agreeing on stuff was what made us feel good). We talked about the ‘good old times’ before First Contact, painting a picture of Humanity on the cusp of a peaceful, united utopia before the aliens came in and ruined it all.  


Yeah, that kind of naïve thinking might seem stupid now, but it didn’t seem so stupid to us. Not then. No one had asked us if we wanted these people on our planet – the treaties and contracts had been signed by politicians so far removed from us they might as well have been alien, too. Yet we had to take the brunt of it, had to walk down the streets of our hometowns and see green or blue faces – and, if push came to shove, have our own daughter bring one home for dinner.  


That usually was when the philosophical references ended and the name-calling began. No one felt okay with the idea of interspecies mingling – and didn’t we see the parallels, you ask, didn’t we realize that a few hundred years earlier, people had reacted just the same when confronted with the idea of mixed-race relations?  


I’ll be honest with you: no, we didn’t. And even if we had, it wouldn’t have mattered. Humans procreating with Humans, that was on an entirely different level than the unnatural idea of human-alien hybrids (note the lowercase letter, here). The thought scared us more than any of it, more even than the idea of living next to a family of blue-faced, antennaed igloo dwellers or having a pointy-eared colleague citing Surak at the office Christmas party. It meant losing the capital H, the thing that made us Human rather than human. And we couldn’t bear thinking about it.  


I realize none of this will endear me to any of the people I work with now. It doesn’t endear me to myself, if that makes any sense. And I can’t even pinpoint that enlightening moment when I realized that I’d built my ideas about the world on a pretty shitty premise, that “Saul-to-Paul” moment when I became a better man. There wasn’t really any of that. Marriage happened, and then divorce happened, and the nerve-wracking, dragged-out mud-slinging that is a custody battle between two people who really can’t stand the sight of one another any more.  


What was left, in the end, was a man who wasn’t sure of anything anymore, and who had no choice but to leave it all behind. I’d never in my life entertained the idea of joining Star Fleet – during our porch-and-iced-tea discussions, Star Fleet had always been an institution installed and maintained by The Man, an organization of do-gooders set on letting even more aliens know that hey, there’s a place called Earth and they’ll buy every bridge you want to sell them.  


Post-divorce me didn’t think about it much. Against my every expectation, I enjoyed my time at the academy, even if it felt a little strange, being back in the classroom and having to wear a uniform, of all things. There was a lot of teaching about alien cultures and interspecies relations, and there was that one instructor who told us that it’s normal to mistrust the unknown – that it’s built into our DNA. That’s what we’d been saying, back on George’s porch, and I’d become self-aware enough at the time to be surprised to hear our ideas echoed from a lectern at Starfleet Academy. But the instructor didn’t stop there. What makes us human, she said, is to be aware of our distrust and not let it curb our potential. Cast out fear, the Vulcans like to say, but we humans aren’t that great at casting out our feelings. So keep the fear, she said. Keep it and talk about it and think about it and maybe, at some point, allow it to transform into fascination. If you castigate yourself for being afraid, that’s where you’ll stay, denying your own self and taking away any chance of growth. Accept your wariness of the unknown, and you may yet rise beyond it.  


Maybe that’s what happened to me. I don’t know, and I can’t claim that I’ve transformed all my fear into curiosity and appreciation. I’m no capital-H Human anymore, that’s for sure. How could I be? I’ve seen places, met people that are so different, so uniquely alien, that they make our porch discussions look like kindergartners playing Feds and Klingons.  


It’s ironic (or maybe poetic justice, depending on your point of view) that one of my closest co-workers should be one of the first Vulcan-human hybrids in existence. Someone we’d cited as Exhibit A for unnatural reproduction, back then (yes, Spock’s birth stirred a minor media uproar, and caused more than one church to formally ban Amanda Grayson from ever entering their premises). Spock was no longer the only one, not since the exchange programs that started when I was a teenager and human communities began to establish themselves on Vulcan. But he was the first, and as such had the dubious honor of becoming a symbolic figure to many.  


It was only after I’d known him for several years that he mentioned (casually, Spock would always mention things like that casually) the hate mail he received on a regular basis. He even showed me some examples. Most of them were short and riddled with spelling mistakes, but there was that twenty-pages essay explaining in detail why a “creature” like him shouldn’t exist. Jim loves the one where they offer to baptize Spock and wash away the sin of his existence, but I could never laugh at any of those letters. To me, they’re like echoes from the past, and I feel embarrassed whenever I think of them.  


Over time, Spock and I established the kind of relationship that’s like a game – there are rules, and sometimes you break them, but not too often or the whole thing goes belly-up and you’re left floundering.  


I called him things that were most definitely not politically correct (and yes, there was that time when I got into trouble with HR about it, and why did you think we don’t have HR consulting on a starship? Starships are paragons of bureaucracy). I called him ‘green-blooded’ and ‘pointy’ and ‘hobgoblin’, and he insulted everything from my intelligence to my professionality down to the shirts I like to wear in the rec room. And when HR came down on me after some ensign had written them an e-mail, Spock sat down with them and explained calmly and logically why Leonard H. McCoy, MD, was not a racist. He was so convincing that they couldn’t help but let it go. And when I tried to thank him, he raised that eyebrow at me and told me that he would of course have wanted me off the ship, but Jim seemed kind of used to having me around and so he’d done the logical thing in helping his captain out (rephrase all that in Vulcan-speak, and you have what he said).  


He continues to play our game, and I do, too. It is a diversion, if nothing else, and he is more than equal to me in terms of snappy one-liners and biting retorts. Jim could never quite get the hang of it. Unlike HR, he understands that Spock doesn’t feel discriminated against, but he doesn’t see the appeal in trading words like punches in a boxing match. You wouldn’t think so, given his track record, but Jim is actually a very peace-loving man. He grew up in a household where yelling and name-calling was pretty much the baseline for interaction, and maybe it’s no surprise that as an adult, he likes to keep things harmonious, at least with his friends. That doesn’t mean there’s no bantering with Jim, but it’s not the special thing I have with Spock.  


Do I love Jim, you ask? Yes I do. He’s my person, my go-to, one of the few people who know about my capital-H past and don’t judge me.  


Do I love Spock? That’s more complicated. Leonard McCoy of the Human Society would have denied that such feelings can exist between members of our species and aliens. Bones McCoy who’s just plain old human doesn’t claim to know much about love, whether between humans or aliens or any two sentient, feeling beings.  


All I know that I can’t imagine my life without either of those two, and it doesn’t matter that one of them has green blood and a way of thinking I will never understand.  


Spock and I have our war of words and wits going, and it took a long time – years, actually – for us to interact on a level that was not a battlefield of sarcasm and logic.  


I remember the occasion when I first saw a glimpse of that other Spock, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that it happened on one of the blackest days of my career. Yes, I’d lost patients before and I’d failed to help others, and that is hard on any doctor, no matter what they say. But on that day it wasn’t anything I had done or not done.  


It was something others had done, and I’d never been more ashamed to be human.  


You know what they say – we’ve moved beyond many of the things that plagued humanity in the past, hunger, poverty, war and all that. I say we still have a long way to go. Anyone claiming that we’re an enlightened species hasn’t seen what I saw on that day.  


It was a few weeks after _Va’Pak_ , as the Vulcans call the day when that madman destroyed their planet. When I say madman, that’s exactly what I mean – Nero had a psychosis the size of Pluto, and yes, I do very much think that Pluto is a planet.  


The Federation was in a state of chaos. Alliances had to be re-formed, an entire system of defense had to be re-evaluated, thousands of Vulcan refugees had to be housed _somewhere_ until a suitable place for a colony had been found.  


Somewhere turned out to be on Earth – it was a planet more suited to their needs than icy Andoria, and less rigid in cultural mores than Tellar. And we rose to the challenge, if I do say so. We didn’t do a great job, maybe – many Vulcans had to spend weeks sleeping on cots in refurbished warehouses or gymnasiums – but we did it, and none of the Vulcans uttered a single word of complaint. It isn’t their way, and that’s something I admire about them. I met an entire deep desert clan living on twenty-by-twenty meters, their privacy ensured only by flimsy aluminum walls. They didn’t speak a word of Standard, but they presented their human hosts with one of their ancient chests in a ceremony of thanks. The thing was as heavy as a huge rock, covered in gemstones, and the human camp administrators had no idea what to do with it (they couldn’t even lift it). But the matriarch insisted on giving it to them, and later it turned out to be worth hundreds of thousands of credits. The clan could have bought themselves a mansion in the country with that thing. They did not. Spock told me that to those deep desert dwellers, it is an unimaginable offense to refuse someone’s hospitality. The entire clan would have lost their honor, had they done so.  


Why was I on Earth at the time, you ask? Well, the Enterprise had been called home for repairs, and most of the crew got temporary reassignments. I went to help Starfleet’s medical division in caring for the refugees, and learned more about Vulcan anatomy and psychology than I had during my entire training. Geoff M’Benga was an invaluable source of information and support during those weeks.  


Yes, I’m digressing, and I guess it’s because I hate thinking about that night, and the nights that followed. I’d rather think about my conversation with the deep-desert Healer (we’d rustled up a Universal Translator by then) and what she told me about the healing powers of rain storms. I’d rather remember teaching a very serious Vulcan toddler to play hide and seek, and coaxing a smile onto his face.  


It started when some of the Vulcan parents came up to us, looking worried (as worried as they allowed themselves to be, but even Vulcan parents can’t stay entirely calm when their children are concerned). Some of the kids, three boys and two girls, all between five and eight years old, had disappeared. They’d had their parents’ okay to ‘spend time’ (a human would have said ‘play’) in the park outside the building, and they hadn’t come back. Their parents had searched the premises and found nothing, except for a sehlat toy one of the kids had been carrying around.  


Now, as a human you’d say those kids decided to have a little adventure of their own and explore the strange new planet. But Vulcan kids aren’t like that. They’re not exactly logical, not the little ones, anyway – that takes long and arduous training, as you might expect. They are obedient, though, far more so than human kids. I once saw a Vulcan three-year-old calmly refuse to put on her robes, and her five-year-old sister staring at her as if she’d thrown a full-blown tantrum. One stern look from her mother, and the little girl meekly put on her robes and bowed in apology for her show of disrespect. No, Vulcan parents aren’t ogres for the kids to behave that way. I’ve never seen a Vulcan mother or father so much as raise their voice. It’s just the way they are.  


… and I’m digressing again. So, the kids were gone, and of course we started a search round town, alerting the authorities and local media networks. The kids didn’t turn up the following day and the night after that, and by then the parents were frantic (if you want to know what that looks like, a frantic Vulcan goes very quiet and still, and only speaks when it’s absolutely necessary).  


Then the call came in. A farmer living about fifty miles out of town had discovered an abandoned aircar on his property, and inside the aircair, five traumatized Vulcan children.  


They beamed the kids directly into Starfleet Medical, where a team of specialists was waiting for them. I was part of that team, and later, part of the investigation when Starfleet came to take our statements.  


I don’t really want to tell you what they’d done to the kids. It still makes sick to think about it. But I’ve come this far, and I believe that everyone _should_ know. If it makes only one person think about their choices in life, it’s worth it.  


They’d cut them. That was the first thing we saw – those deep, cruel cuts, purposefully inflicted in ways and places where it hurt the most. The palms of the hands and soles of the feet. The face and the head. One of the boys was missing his left ear tip.  


They’d hit them. They had bruises all over, from belts and sticks and what-not. Three of the kids had serious inner bleeding from being kicked so hard.  


They’d abused them. If you’re a doctor or a nurse, you might know what the genitals of a child look like after they’ve been sexually assaulted by an adult, and if you’re not, you’ll lead a happier life without knowing. I’ll just repeat what I said before: the oldest kid was an eight-year-old girl, the youngest a five-year-old boy. And the humans who had kidnapped them didn’t care. They _brutalized_ these children.  


The kidnappers left a padd with a message in the car. The special unit found it later – at first, everyone’s focus was on helping the kids. And it tears at my heart even now to say that for one of the kids, even our best efforts weren’t enough. Sikar, whose name means ‘spring season’ and who had just turned six years old, died that night of massive internal injuries, blood loss and plain shock. His parents were with him. They didn’t shed any tears, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone look more… destroyed. It’s the only word I can think of.  


That message. Starfleet’s Special Victims Division played it to us later. There were three humans, all male, their faces blurred and their voices distorted by some kind of editing app. It wasn’t even that well done; the investigators extracted the original video within a few hours. These men weren’t very bright or creative. But they were filled with a hatred so intense to make up for their lack of natural intelligence or initiative. They read a ‘manifesto’ to the camera, some blather about an Earth tainted by alien influence and an interplanetary conspiracy to drive humanity (Humanity, in their case) to extinction. “We won’t let that happen,” they said. “We won’t stand for it! This is only the beginning.”  


And then they pulled dark masks over their heads and turned to the children, who could be seen in a corner of the room, bound hands and feet and clearly terrified. After that, only the hardiest of investigators could go on watching. Most of us left the room within a minute. There was one pediatrician who vomited on the floor, right there in front of ten Starfleet officers watching. I don’t blame her.  


I somehow got through it – the questioning, going back to the hospital and pulling a double shift, napping on a couch in the break room and then back to the grind, talking to Starfleet investigators, journalists and worst of all, the parents.  


They were so damn calm, you wanted to shake them and yell in their faces, “do you realize that’s your daughter who’s been brutally raped?” And then you saw their eyes and it made you feel like the lowest slime in existence. They thanked us for taking care of their children, did that ceremonial bow thing that signifies deep gratitude, and all we wanted to do was go and beat something to a pulp.  


I did just that. I went to an abandoned conference room somewhere in Starfleet Medical and started trashing the place. It was an idiotic thing to do, but it was either that or drink myself into oblivion, and I couldn’t afford to do that. They needed me back in the ICU.  


When it was over, when I’d kicked the chairs across the room and smashed the polished surface of the wall screen, I sat down at the conference table and cried. I couldn’t deal, not with everything else that had been piling up. To see those men spouting all-too-familiar propaganda and then throw a six-year-old down on a table and-  


No. Just no. Go and read the investigation report if you really want to know.  


Spock and Sarek had been part of the investigation from the beginning. Sarek as the ambassador to Earth represented the refugees’ interests, and Spock as one of the few high-ranking Vulcan Starfleet officers was a logical choice to be involved.  


It wasn’t a surprise, therefore, when Spock came to find me in that conference room. He’d been in and out of Starfleet Medical ever since the kids had been found. I didn’t want to see him, though, and I told him as much.  


Typical of him, he ignored this completely, sitting down in the chair next to mine – the only one I hadn’t kicked across the room.  


And he didn’t beat around the bush in what he’d come to say. Vulcans seldom do.  


“It is illogical to feel guilty, doctor. You did not perpetrate those crimes.”  


I stared at him, aware that I must look like a madman with my red eyes, dirty hair and stubble after three days of not shaving. “Don’t you fucking tell me what to do, Spock. You don’t know a damn thing about me.”  


“I know about your past associations with the Human Society,” he said, calm as always. I just looked at him, stupidly and without knowing what to say.  


“I took it upon myself to investigate the backgrounds of our newly formed command team,” he continued, as if it was only natural that he had found the time to do so between his planet’s destruction and ferrying thousands of homeless Vulcans to Earth. “You ceased all contact with that group even before you entered Starfleet Academy. Your psychological profile shows that you exhibit no signs of xenophobia or bigotry when interacting with alien species. It is only logical to assume that you have changed your beliefs.”  


I’d found my voice by then. “Logic doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”  


“Logic is part of who you are,” he said. “You are a scientist, doctor. If facts indicate that a hypothesis is wrong, you conclude that your initial assumptions must have been incorrect, and you seek a new explanation. You are not to blame if others are unable to see beyond their faulty beliefs.”  


“How can you say that? Those men… that was me, back in the day. That was what I used to tell people.”  


“That was never you, Leonard.”  


He had never used my first name before, and he didn’t do it again, not for several years after that. It rattled me enough to break through my self-inflicted angst, to make me realize in that very instant that he was just as shaken as I was.  


“Aliens still scare me.” I said it very softly, but I knew he’d hear it with those unnaturally sharp ears of his. “I like to say that it’s space, but it’s really not. It’s who lives out there. That’s something I could never get rid of. I’m not sure I ever will.”  


“And yet you are here, conversing with me,” he said. “I am representative of the very thing you used to despise, am I not?”  


“Yes,” I said, because at that point I couldn’t be anything but completely honest.  


“Do you despise me now? Do you believe me to be inferior?”  


“No,” I said. “Not inferior. Just… weird.”  


“As I do you,” he said, and to my astonishment there was an amused twinkle in his eyes. “To me, you are very ‘weird’, as you say. Yet I do not believe myself capable of harming human children as a result.”  


“Don’t make fun!” I said (which, come to think of it, was a strange thing to tell a Vulcan). “You didn’t see that tape. You don’t understand.”  


“I saw the recording,” he said, every last trace of amusement gone. “I do understand. And I petition that you return with me to the Intensive Care Unit. Dr. M’Benga has been asking after your whereabouts. He is consulting with the Healers how to best combine an externally induced healing trance with sedative medication, and wishes for a senior physician’s opinion.”  


I remembered the Vulcan Healers’ attempts to put little Sovik into a healing trance – he was too young to initiate it on his own, and too distraught to allow a Healer’s mind touch. It had worked with the other children, but Sovik was barely five years old. M’Benga’s idea to use a combined treatment was a good one.  


I got up. “Lead the way.”  


It was a long night, and I didn’t exactly finish my shift feeling any better, but we did manage to help Sovik into a trance, and that was really all that mattered.  


T’Per, T’Zal, Svai and Sovik recovered. It took a long time, and T’Zal will never regain mind-touch ability in her left hand (the cuts had severed a strand of telepathic nerves that could not be regrown). But they survived, and by that I don’t just mean that they did not die. Vulcans are incredibly strong that way.  


Sikar was buried the Vulcan way, several weeks later: his cremated remains were transferred to a shrine his clan had built in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Starfleet had bought the site for them and hired a security company to guard it 24/7. People of all species went there to engage in their own mourning rituals – humans put down flowers and left cards, Andorians cut themselves with ceremonial daggers to honor Sikar’s final resting place with a drop of their blood, and Vulcans meditated at the site and drew ancient symbols into the dust.  


I didn’t go there. No amount of mourning or ritual can bring back the dead, or change the fact that the best of Starfleet’s medical division hadn’t been able to save that little boy. What I did was nag and piss off the brass until they agreed to move the victims’ families to separate, better housing. I didn’t have to nag much. In those days, pretty much everyone wanted to do something to help (and make up for the fact that the kidnappers had been human, although only few said so out loud).  


I should probably tell you what happened to those men. They were caught, yes, and there was a huge media interest in their trial. They were made out to be monsters, cold-blooded killers. They certainly were that, but they were also human, distressingly so. One of them killed himself in prison, a few months later. Another was found stabbed to death, and it never became quite clear if the other inmates had done it, or if the guards had let someone in to do the job. I don’t think anyone spent much time investigating the case.  


You’ll know at this point that I’m not exactly a person guided by logic, no matter what Spock might have to say. I’m a man with a not-quite-healthy tendency to drink when he’s in a bad mood, a teenage daughter he hardly sees, and a secret fear of aliens. Whenever I call Spock a green-blooded hobgoblin or a cold logic machine, I make fun of that fear, and Spock understands that. I know that he’s a better man than I will ever be, willing as he is to play this game for my sake and call himself my friend.  


Do I love him, my alien friend? Yes, I think I do. At least I can say this much.  


Time will tell the rest.

**Author's Note:**

> I'd be very interested to know what you think!


End file.
